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I'm interviewing for a Production Engineer role at Facebook on Monday, thanks for providing relevant "do you have any questions for us" content.
by 40acres 8y ago
I'm interviewing for a Production Engineer role at Facebook on Monday, thanks for providing relevant "do you have any questions for us" content.
- mtw 8y agoGood question is why oh why switch WhatsApp to Facebook tech when it was running perfectly ok on its own. Never crashed.
- macintux 8y agoSpeaking as an Erlang developer I approve of this question.
- duado 8y agoSo that engineers can be moved between product groups while carrying relevant knowledge and experience with them.
- yellowapple 8y agoI'm pretty sure a bunch of Erlang programmers being shoehorned into a PHP codebase is the literal definition of Hell for all parties involved.
- duado 8y agoFacebook is not a “PHP codebase.” I’d guess that fewer than 0.01% of CPU cycles at Facebook are used by PHP.
- nothal 8y agoIsn’t a significant amount of the codebase in Hack, a PHP derivative?
- Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 8y agoC++ is the most popular language at Facebook, I know that one for sure. They used to run PHP on HipHop VM which was written in C++, but now they transpile PHP to C++.
- yellowapple 8y agoThe transpiler is HipHop. They discontinued that in favor of HHVM, which does JIT compilation instead. More info: https://hhvm.com/ https://hhvm.com/ EDIT: apparently, though, HHVM stopped supporting PHP itself last month; now it only supports Hack. I'm not familiar enough with Hack to know how much it actually deviates from / improves upon PHP.
- macintux 8y agoIf that’s the goal, why not start incorporating more Erlang into the rest of Facebook instead? It proved its mettle at WhatsApp.
- duado 8y agoFacebook has to hire thousands of engineers per year. They may incorporate more Erlang into Facebook, but they have to have a core tech stack that can easily onboard engineers from a variety of backgrounds. I don't have the foggiest idea of whether Erlang can be part of that or not, but people talk about it as if it's a special-purpose tool.
- kevsim 8y agoFacebook was actually using Erlang way before WhatsApp https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Erlang-chosen-for-use-in-Facebook-chat https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Erlang-chosen-for-use-in-Faceb...
- mietek 8y agoThe answer should be clear at this point. WhatsApp provided too much privacy and not enough monetisation opportunities.
- packetslave 8y agoGood luck! If you’re interviewing in MPK make sure your recruiter takes you to the barbecue shack for lunch
- erobbins 8y agoBut be prepared to stand in line for longer than it takes you to actually eat.
- packetslave 8y ago#worthit (although I’ll admit my afternoon interviews were a bit... challenging... after 5lbs of brisket)
- taneq 8y agoYou think they might have a couple more vacancies going now? :P
- B-Con 8y agoWhen I interviewed for SRE at Google, they'd had a non-trivial cross product outage days before. Good conversation starter, but I couldn't get many details out of them.
- t3rabytes 8y agoYou mean this week when they took out most of our their cloud and public products for a few hours? /s
- kheiron1729 8y agoI advise you against it. You can frame it in a different way though. Maybe ask how do they mitigate issues as big as these and their post-mortem procedure.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y agoFunnily enough, same for me too! New Grad this Friday. Good luck!